Where we stay

TrustedHousesitters

This is how we find 99% of our sits, and how we live rent-free while we do it: you look after someone's home and pets, they get peace of mind, and you get a place to land. Twenty-five sits in, with this August marking a year of doing it - about a sit every two weeks. Five homes have already asked us back, with more return visits booked. That last number is the one I'd watch: it's the proof the whole system works.

The plans - sitter tiers, in USD:

Prices checked 23 July 2026.

Basic gets you unlimited access to sits and a free background check. Standard adds the things that matter mid-search - vet video calls and chat, instant alerts on unlimited saved searches, member support, and an accident and third-party liability plan. Premium adds the booking-fee waiver, a sit cancellation plan, two global airport lounge passes, and a profile badge.

Which tier? Premium costs $90 more than Standard, and Standard charges $12 a sit - so Premium pays for itself at eight sits a year. We did twenty-five. That's the honest reason I'm on it, and the lounge passes only earn their keep because we occasionally fly to a sit. Either way, a year runs about the cost of one or two hotel nights.

What actually gets you invited back isn't the membership - it's everything around the sit. Every one of these does the same job: it takes a little more of the homeowner's anxiety off the table, at a different point in the process.

1. Application. Be yourself, and be honest. I say I work from home and will be around all day when that's true. And I talk about the pets specifically - what it is about them that made me want the sit. Dogs that hike or walk are a green light; I want a movement buddy. I'm choosing the sit by the animal, not the house.
2. Before an offer. We always offer to talk before anyone expects us to commit.
3. Before it starts. We do our best to meet the owner in person - in the days leading up, or by showing up early before they leave - to get the lay of the land.
4. During. On longer sits we offer video calls, so owners can see their pets while they're away and missing them. Low cost to us, real peace of mind for them.
5. Departure and after. We leave the house as close to how we found it. On the way out I send a templated text with the status of everything: pet fed and walked, bathrooms, washer and dryer, dishwasher, where the mail and packages are. Afterward, when I see a listing from a home we've sat, I reach out even when we can't take it - a wish we could see the pet again, enjoy your trip note that keeps us in mind. And when we're heading back to an area, I message past owners nearby: we'll be around these dates, in case you want to grab lunch or have travel of your own coming up.

My referral link gets you 25% off an annual membership - and if you sign up, I get two months free. (Yep, it's a referral link - thanks for using it.)

Get 25% off TrustedHousesitters →

Once you're sitting regularly, the days start adding up in ways that matter - Schengen windows, US state-residency lines. That's exactly why I built Sojourn, a free tool to log your stays and watch those counts for you.

Hilton Honors

A night between sits, or the buffer night when we fly to one - rarely more than two, usually a mix of points and cash. The buffer matters more than it sounds, on both ends: you can't cut a flight close to a sit's start, and you need a cushion on the back end too, in case the owner's return flight goes sideways.

MGM Rewards

If you already hold status somewhere, don't leave it on the table. My partner has Diamond with Royal Caribbean and I'm on his account, so his tier travels with me - and MGM matches Royal. That's how we ended up Gold with MGM without ever earning a single night at an MGM property. You go to the rewards desk in person, show the cruise tier, and they bump you.

Worth being honest about what Gold is actually worth, though. The points are close to useless. We've spent thousands across MGM properties and we're sitting on about thirty points we have never once used - they accrue that slowly. If the points were the reason to do this, it wouldn't be worth doing.

The perks are the reason. Comped nights at Excalibur and Luxor, and severely reduced rates at the mid-tier properties - New York-New York, Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand. The more you book, the better the rates get. This June it got us a week at Excalibur for under $200.

And occasionally it's more than that: we booked a basic king at Mandalay Bay for two nights and got handed a two-bedroom suite instead - two separate bedrooms, two living areas, a little kitchen bar. Nobody mentioned it in advance, it was just what was waiting at check-in. I can't tell you exactly why, but it tracks with the rest of it: the more you use this, the more you seem to get back.

Two catches worth knowing before you lean on it. The match has to be re-upped every year when the rewards card expires, and the renewal is in person - which gets tricky when you're not physically there and trying to book on those rates. And the comped nights don't stack: in our experience you get one, and you won't get another until that stay has actually happened. So you can't sit down and book a run of free nights across a season. They come one at a time, at the pace you're actually travelling.

We're not in Vegas for Vegas. We're there because we're trying to get somewhere else - LA, Utah, Arizona, the long haul east - and it's a good enough connection point that the stop happens anyway. The rooms are what we do with a night we were already going to spend.

Which property depends on where the stop lands in the week. Weekday, we're working, and the deciding factor is whether the room has a desk - a real one, somewhere you'd actually sit. Not every Vegas hotel has a good working setup, and plenty of rooms photograph beautifully with nowhere to put a laptop. So we go through the pictures before booking rather than finding out after. Weekend, that constraint drops and we choose on price and pool instead.